Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
by EHWIES
Summary: He wants to live forever because maybe that will be long enough to find—something. He wants to hear the whimpers because they are not his.
1. Wretch

**Wretch**

Tom gets by fine without her, but that doesn't make the nights all right.

Where are the dirty ones supposed to go? The wretches are human, too.

The door to the Ravenclaw common room gives him splinters, but he doesn't have a hard time postulating his way past the knocker. "I'm an awful hunter, and I don't understand why you do this," he tells Dorcas. "But I didn't know where else to go, so now you know."

Her hair is so blonde that it's silver in the dappling light. Her hands are so bony. "You've got to learn one of these days that I don't want you."

Until Dorcas, Tom's never loved anything but his books, his black books, and the corpses and the flames. She thinks it means he's sick, loves other ones too, loves other ones more. "I try so hard—" to fight it for her.

Her sighs run deep as her belly; he's been surviving on her exhales, gasping in her can't and lapping up her wither. "Come inside. I'll run you through _Accio_ again. You were having trouble with that one, weren't you?"


	2. A bag full of God

**A/N:** This was supposed to be a one-shot. Now it's not. Still keeping this marked Complete for now, though, since whether or not I add more to it depends on how well my emotional wordvomit translates to Tom and Dorcas.

* * *

**A bag full of God**

Dorcas likes to throw words around, like _love_ and _best friend_ and _asshole_, so that you can't ever quite tell if she's _actually_ pissed or pleased or whatever it is with you or if she's just messing. She tells jokes that are funny because they're true-but-darker, but how deep the black runs isn't something you can ever figure out without asking, and her command of irony is so intricate that even then she might not know how to give a straight answer when she tries. It's not something she intends and not something you should risk telling her about.

Today, though, she's dropped her bells. "You don't know what it's been like without you," she says when he tears after her and engulfs her in the biting air.

"Oh—oh," says Tom, and runs away, like she's always wanted him to.

There are so many things Tom doesn't understand: the way Dorcas loves him but doesn't, and how to make a Horcrux, and why he needs to kill her.


	3. the Pieces

**A/N:** This is rapidly becoming a wordvomit WIP and has now been marked as such. I don't know how long it will last or how I'll know when it's over, but it's coming out uncannily smoothly. Title taken from Allison Crowe's brilliant "Disease" (_Tidings_ version); previous chapter title taken from Sylvia Plath's similarly brilliant "Daddy."

* * *

_without you, it's not as much fun to pick up_ **the Pieces**

Chasing their mud blood and chased by his own on her arm as he spins Dorcas out, all champagne-glass and simpering; in the alleys behind the charity balls, after the shrieks, after the winter after the shrieks, marble-faced as that expectant thumb drags over his chilled knuckles like a threat, or maybe a prayer; stillness ringing (everything has always rung his ears dizzy, even nothing, and so he is always searching) until the hours she finds him and patches his deliberate accidents, over her snaps and raps and leaves and inside the shredding of her creamy back, behind the shawl of her indoor shame (the snow catching her eyelashes is full of boiling endings), dreading his audacity to call them a love story, scrabbling at the vertigo of their flesh and the vermilion of his carvings, so possessive, so possessed—

—Tom does not weep, and Tom does not pray, no he doesn't.


	4. Death Rattle

**A/N:** Apparently E's reaction to stress vomiting irl is to write wordvomit about vomit. Enjoy. Review!

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**Death Rattle**

If Dorcas hadn't left—not if she were still here, he's full to bursting without her here, but if she hadn't come and then gone (like flighty petal, smirking on the gust)—but if Dorcas hadn't _left_, everything would be on the cusp, wouldn't it? These are the days when Tom is still gorgeous, the women at his back and comrades all falling together raptly in the late nights, and he would feel a home nested within his Hogwarts if only he could muster it to matter. His nose is sharp angles, and death is crumbling to stardust, and it is not enough to outlast her if he's gaping, and oh, Tom gapes, like craters in the war.

Something is trembling, something bigger than bodies and blacker than even Tom, and he's always been the darkest, dazzled by cobwebs in the corners. Something is rattling him round and round, and his grandeur and loyalists pale in it, and Dorcas has always been so still, her hands steadying his over Potions cauldrons and knowing where to go. Tom—he just shakes over the basin, flushed green and heaving, underneath all of the gone.


	5. Detox

**A/N:** In case this isn't clear already, these aren't in chronological order.

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**Detox**

He hates the orphanage. He hates the word orphanage, too.

With silver hair like that, it doesn't startle him at all that she's banging half the castle, because she can't keep her mouth shut or take a social cue or keep her legs shut, either. Tom doesn't cut her for this out loud, because that would be cruel and Tom may be bad but not to her, never to her, if he can help it, although most days he can't help it. Even with him, she can't keep her legs shut, even when she finds the animals in his ground or catches his bodies flipping. They're just bodies, nothing more, same as he is.

He's known for a while, and Dorcas has known that Tom knows for a while, and then he stays, and then she tells him not to anymore. No more balls on her arm at her parents' invite. No more drawer in her dormitory armoire to piss off her roommates when they catch him naked on schedule.

Tom has never loved much, and now Tom thinks it best that he not love anything. It relieves him. Dorcas and her silver hair and her open legs continue to bang half the castle, because the others don't claw her open and she has always had her fixes to recover from him, and Tom continues to practice.


	6. rulers make bad lovers

**A/N:** Title from Fleetwood Mac.

* * *

**rulers make bad lovers**

He wants to live forever because maybe that will be long enough to find—something. He wants to hear the whimpers because they are not his.

"Jesus, Tom, not _now_," Rosier hisses when Tom's wand clatters down. The first year looks from Tom to Rosier to Tom to Tom's wand and cries out loud. "Lord in heaven. _Obliviate_," he says, and then Tom's back is tingling as Rosier raps him hard.

The first year is still crying but no longer knows why. Tom can't remember why he's here, either.


	7. Merry

**A/N:** Wrote this a few days ago but didn't have a ton of Internet access at the time, which is good because then instead of just posting and hoping for the best like I normally do I was able to actually go back and revise some things before putting this up (and good thing I did, because there was definitely some explicit whining in there that did the fic good to be taken out, haha). Merry Christmas! Don't be like Tom. Tom is a sad day.

* * *

**Merry**

She was hoping to have this resolved by Christmas, she said, like he's something that needs to be dealt with instead of something else. Tom doesn't like to have anyone looking at him like that, least of all Dorcas.

If he could, he would lock away the fractures in his face somewhere that she couldn't find them, even when he laid them at her feet like always. All Tom needed to be real were for Dorcas to stay and for Dorcas to not do it again, but she always leaves and always does it again. Tom knows she thinks he's awful, he got that part, but when she balls him up and throws him out, he doesn't—… If he can't make her—then Tom's going to have to do something; he can't keep fracturing, or letting her see it, or letting her not care whether he is or isn't, so long as she can _resolve_ him, dear God.

Tom loathes holidays. They make him feel like he's supposed to act like a person, or something.


End file.
